February is recognized by Canada’s Heart and Stroke Foundation as Heart Month. Each year, hundreds of thousands of Canadians mobilize to campaign together in raising awareness and “life-saving” funds to improve the lives of heart and stroke patients across the country. Throughout the month, volunteers will be holding local fundraising events like “CPR-a-thons” and bake sales to educate the public and attract donors. At the end of the day, volunteers and donors alike should be commended for their good deeds. They have given up their own time and money to help complete strangers from whom they will never be repaid. Surely, these are acts of altruism, right? Not quite.
Altruism is defined as the selfless concern for others — that is, you are willing to help others at your own expense. Most acts of goodwill and charity would fall into this category. Heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of firefighters and soldiers alike would undoubtedly fall squarely within our definition. But are any of these acts truly altruistic? Many philosophers, biologists, psychologists, and sociologists think not. The simple reason? You were rewarded, and this is true whether you were aware of it or not.
When you donate money to a charity fund or volunteer time for a nearby hospital, do you feel good at the end? For me, it’s usually a warm, fuzzy feeling. In actuality, that feeling originates from the pleasure centers in your brain. In 2006, neuroscientists at the National Institute of Health provided the first evidence for the neurological underpinnings of seemingly altruistic acts. Their research showed that the mesolimbic reward pathway in the brain was activated when subjects made a monetary contribution to a charity. This pathway, activated in part by dopamine (the feel-good neurotransmitter), is the same pathway that usually lights up in response to food, drugs, and sex. This landmark study suggests that our acts of goodwill may not stem wholly from our sense of morality, but are instead an outlet from which we can derive pleasure, and in our case this is the reward.
Whoever said money can’t buy happiness?
How can one explain the natural instinct of parents to sacrifice themselves for their children even at the cost of their lives? Surely, there’s nothing to “feel good” about when you’ve died. It turns out that the mechanical and utterly impersonal hand of evolution also dictates just how “altruistic” we are. According to evolutionary biologists, the goal of every living organism is to survive, and, in doing so, to procreate and allow for the propagation of that organism’s genes. To answer the last question, W. D. Hamilton, a prominent evolutionary biologist, proposed the theory of kin selection. Here, we imagine an individual as a carrier of a set of genes. If a mother dies in the process of saving four of her children, she will have saved twice the amount of her own genes (because each child inherits half of her genes). Her sacrifice, on a purely genetic basis, would allow her to pass on twice the amount of her genes to the next generation, which in her case is the reward.
Everything we do and every action we take is driven by a motive. Otherwise, we would not do it. Arguably, we would never do anything that would harm or disadvantage us without knowing that the eventual payoff will be greater than the undertaken cost. Over the years, social psychologists have depicted many forms of such payoffs that we inadvertently reap from our “selfless” behaviours. Assisting a colleague with their assignment builds our self-esteem. Good deeds help us neutralize our guilt; they earn us a good reputation with our friends and family and, as Friedrich Nietzsche would point out, they give us a taste of power along the way. They also solidify our legacy and win honour for our family. What does this all mean? It means that mutualism is as good as we get: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. There’s really nothing wrong with that. Perhaps, on a pragmatic level, it doesn’t matter why we give, as long as we do give. Just ask the 60 year-old grandmother waiting for a heart transplant.
